Performing Class in British Popular Music

By Nathan Wiseman-Trowse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, November 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-230-21949-6, $75.00. 216 pages.

Review by Christopher Malone, Northeastern State University

Perhaps the hardest lesson that a materialist approach to culture has to teach us concerns our habits of consumption. What we like or dislike, our sense of things being true, good, and authentic: these intuitive responses to the world (and the marketplace) seem most intimately our own. But these responses are shaped by socio-economic and discursive forces as much as the objects of culture that elicit these responses. If marketing executives trust the power of culture to shape these habits and perceptions in consumers, it is difficult all the same to think about the naturalness of our affections as being caught up in such discursive processes.

In his book Performing Class in British Popular Music, Nathan Wiseman-Trowse examines these processes as they shape the way audiences register the authenticity of a work of pop music. He argues that part of what makes us respond to a song or artist as genuine or “real” has to do with representations of class, not only in the lyrical content of the song but in the entire “rock discourse” that surrounds it. One recent barometer for measuring this concerns the chart battle in the mid-1990s between Oasis and Blur. “The simple story of two competing young British bands trying to outmanoeuvre each other” (1) turned into a kind of “class war” in the British media. Much was made in the press of how Blur came from the suburban Essex town of Colchester, while Oasis originated in working-class Manchester. Competition between the bands was styled in terms that have a long history in British popular music: working-class authenticity and middle-class artistry.

Wiseman-Trowse’s approach to class here does not involve analysis of actual class positions in a socio-economic sense. Rather class identity is construed as a “relatively mobile form of subjectivity that can be invoked through cultural texts such as popular music” (5). What this means is that audiences, regardless of their socio-economic background, may participate in class identities as they become “sutured” into the outlooks and attitudes conveyed in popular music. How this occurs depends not only on the content of specific songs, or the biographies of artists themselves, but also in the way songs and performers are taken up in “rock discourse.” The effects of marketing and promotion, media portrayals, music videos, fan culture, as well as the history of popular music itself and its “accumulation of textual values across time and space”(5), all comprise a discourse that shapes representations of class and allows audiences to identify with and register the authenticity of popular music.

Drawing from the work of Judith Butler and her performative theory of gender, Wiseman-Trowse goes beyond a model of class understood in deterministic relationship with economic circumstances. Just as Butler critiques certain feminist discourse for assigning a priori roles, actions, and attitudes to the category of womanhood, this study points to the limits of the formulation that “working-class kids produce working class music.” Instead, popular music provides a range of “performative class positions that are proffered through the textual moment” (70).

To speak of the performative nature of rock authenticity means to consider the network of values which give meaning to actions or texts, not just in public discourse but also in the “private” subjectivity of the artist herself. Wiseman-Trowse illustrates this with the example of Richey James (Edwards), guitarist with Manic Street Preachers, and his encounter with a journalist who questioned his band’s authenticity in the press. Edwards took out a razorblade and etched “4 REAL” into his arm. This act of carving authenticity into his arm connects James with “a performative vocabulary that speaks of his authenticity as he performs it” (59). That is, in the words of one critic Wiseman-Trowse cites, “the act is private but has public consequences; the sign is authentic but archly so, calling attention to itself as an artificial statement as it declares its reality” (59).

Of course there is a contradiction inherent in these signifying processes representing class. The authenticity that rock discourse generates—which artists self-reflectively or unconsciously deploy, and into which audiences are in various ways drawn—actually masks what popular music is: an industrialized form that grants the oppositional character and authenticity of pop performers in the first place. It is a contradiction that Wiseman-Trowse carefully explores throughout the history of British popular music.

The scope of the study is broad, as much as it focuses on specific case studies. Wiseman-Trowse offers an overview of the “folk voice” in British culture, and how it came to articulate not “the voice of the people,” but an oppositional idiom deployed to resist commercialism and middle-class values. The first case study considers the conflation of this folk voice with rock music, and how the organic nature of folk performance was supplanted by a sense of authenticity generated through unmediated acoustic performance that came to embody a romantic ideal in opposition to industrialism.

The second case study examines the British punk movement, complicating the popular media portrayal of this music as belonging to the working-class youth. Wiseman-Trowse explores the evolution of punk, the different ways punk engaged its representations in the media, and how it consistently constructed its own values of authenticity in dialogue with and in opposition to rock discourse. He also considers how the genre affirms working-class solidarity, while at the same maintaining a masculine character, the implications of which comment on the values circulating within rock discourse.

While this work does not pretend to be exhaustive in its approach to British popular music, its theoretical implications are far-reaching. Scholars exploring the significance of American popular music, for instance, particularly issues of audience reception, will find much of interest in this study. Performing Class in British Popular Music is a work that considers the “text” of popular music on multiple interpretive horizons, not only at the levels of lyrical content, artist biography, and performance, but also the ever-shifting discursive contexts surrounding and shaping popular music.